VII

Sometimes, it was like she was crying sand. Her eyes were dull and brown like beach glass, and they were scratched. And still her body was heavy, that there was so much more sand inside of her. She felt like sandbags were piling up in her shoulders against some kind of natural disaster. The weight of them was bowing out her spine so that the tenderness between her vertebrae was the only kind of tenderness she knew. She could not ask for things because she could not speak because her throat had become a sandbox and vocabulary was a shifting spit of sand beneath the waves. She was shiftless like sand in love with the ocean. Her teeth were malleable like soapstone. She was afraid of what they might become. Her thighs were like granite from walking in circles. Her toes were hard like pebbles from rubbing in her shoes.

"You're a rock," people would say to her, and she knew she was. Like stone she had her faults. Under pressure, she might crumble, or she might break. She could weather a storm, but not a millennium. She could live with erosion, but not with being picked at, and by now her features were chiseled and sharp. She was crying like snails were making tracks down her cheeks like she was a boulder during some abysmally low tide, like due to isostascy, her face had risen, and left her high and dry.